The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘Time to go below!’

  But the Queen was standing stock-still at the rail, her elegant lines intent and quivering; all her senses were focused on a single point, somewhere landward beyond the foam.

  ‘Hon?’

  She was staring at the cliff tops, where all was dark and inchoate.

  Thunder rolled. The skies cracked open.

  In the fork of lightning, in the instant of the strike, in the kindled radiance of electricity, they saw, clear and present and undeniable, the black, heart-stopping silhouette of a gigantic cat.

  The Fifth Life of Cats

  The fifth age of Felidae history must surely belong to the Troll Cats, or Forest Cats, of Norway, most ancient of breeds but for the cats of the Nile.

  Hedinn and Finna had traveled with their Viking companions far from Norway, a land full of forests and lakes and plentiful game, to Greenland – thus named by the deceitful upright ones to attract new colonists but known by cats as the Cold Land with No Trees – and they were less than impressed by their new surroundings.

  One night in the fire-hall while lazing beneath the benches, they overheard the Vikings talking of a new land discovered far across the ocean. There was much chatter, but since we Felidae take account of human language only when it contains something of interest to us, all that Finna noticed were the words ‘rivers full of salmon,’ ‘fields full of self-sown wheat’ – thus field mice and other snacks – and ‘forests full of game.’

  So when, some weeks later, a great longship sailed into the fiord and was filled with supplies and livestock for the settlement of this new land, the Forest Cats, eager to go a-viking themselves, stowed away.

  For three days the ship sailed through calm seas; but then the fair wind failed and they were becalmed in fog. After two days of northerly winds, which drove them off course, the mists cleared and they sighted land that looked green and wooded so that the cats were eager to put ashore. But the Vikings sailed past with barely a look. Three days later they passed land again, but this time it looked freezing and mountainous, and glaciers came right down to the sea. The cats were relieved to sail past this land, but there had been no fresh catch for a while and they had to steal the Vikings ‘dried fish, which took a great deal of chewing and tasted very stale. They were now beginning to worry about the existence of this fabled land.

  It was some days later when the horizon yielded sight of a white shoreline backed by low-lying green hills. The upright ones made strange squawking cheers and Hedinn ran to the bow and popped his head over the gunwale. They sailed into a wide estuary where the trees came right down to the water. The land looked most promising: birds called in the branches and the bow of the longship parted shoals of fish that gleamed and sparkled in the waves.

  The boat was beached and the humans leapt off, splashing to land through the shallows. They laid planks to the sides for the livestock, but as soon as they had crossed, the planks were hauled off.

  ‘I can’t swim,’ confidedFinna, staring into the water.

  ‘The Felidae are the most adaptable of the Great Cat’s creations; I have no doubt that we shall prevail,’ said Hedinn. ‘Follow me!’

  He launched himself off the side of the ship and swam with considerable style to the beach, where he stood, shaking his coat like a dog. Water droplets radiated from him like a bright halo. Finna gathered her courage and followed with a great deal of splashing.

  Hedinn grinned. ‘It’s a good land,’ he declared. At his feet lay a silver fish, its bright scales shining in the sun.

  The humans built shelters from stone and turf, raisedfences for their livestock, and traded for a time with the brownskinned natives; and the cats ranged widely across the land. In the forests they encountered wildcats – fierce, striped creatures – and struck up an uneasy acquaintance. Then Hedinn lured one young queen away and mated with her among the cool roots of a lodgepole, to produce some nine weeks later a rumbustious band of brindled kittens. He was immensely proud of them and one day was, as ever, boasting of theirfearlessness and the unusual beauty of their mother to a bored Finna, when a voice came from high in the branches. ‘Fat foreign cat, your yammering hurts my ears.’

  Hedinn puffed out his chest, pulled in his stomach, and stood tall. ‘My name is Hedinn Haraldsson,’ he declared, ‘and cats who hang around in trees listening to others ‘ conversations may overhear things that have little to do with them.’

  ‘It is very much my affair,’ replied the wildcat, spiraling headfirst down the tree trunk. ‘For Pine-Scented Fur is one of my females.’

  ‘Where I come from,’ Hedinn said, ‘a female makes her own choice of mate, and woe betide any male who should gainsay her.’

  The wildcat smiled from ear to ear, displaying an alarming array of sharp white teeth. ‘That suggests to me that the males of your country are of little account.’

  ‘Where I come from,’ cried Hedinn, ‘any cat who might suggest such a thing would have to be able to run very fast.’

  ‘I have no intention of running,’ said the wildcat. ‘Instead, I think it is you who should run, for you are outnumbered.’

  Hedinn turned to find another wildcat being faced off by a determined Finna. The wildcat’s wide jaws grinned out of a striped face, and his muscular body was tensed for action.

  ‘I see that you are not confident of your ability to fight me single-pawed,’ Hedinn declared coolly. ‘Maybe you have had your balls chewed off by a troll.’

  The wildcat spat in fury and hurled himself at Hedinn. At this, Finna leapt upon the other wildcat. There was a great deal of snarling and tussling, the wildcats’ speed and wiry strength matching the Troll Cats’ weight and power. Once, the wildcat chief pinned Hedinn beneath him, but Hedinn raised his strong back legs and raked his opponent’s belly. They sprang apart and set to again; first one gaining the advantage, then the other; and so it went for a time. Eventually it became clear that neither side was prevailing and after a while all four cats drew apart, gasping for breath.

  ‘If even the females of your country fight so well, it must be a remarkable country,’ conceded the wildcat chief

  ‘This is also a remarkable country,’ said Hedinn, ‘and we should like to stay here on good terms with you and your fellows.’

  ‘I have no objection to your staying,’ said the wildcat chief, ‘for it seems to me that your breed must be very strong to produce cats of your size, and the mixing of our bloodlines would give advantage over our enemies. I should like to test my theory with your female!’

  ‘This female is not mine, but her own,’ reminded Hedinn. ‘It must be her choice or none.’

  But Finna stepped forward and raised her rump before the wildcat chief, purring deep in her throat. Hedinn’s preference for the native queen had annoyed her; and her blood had been heated by the tussle…

  Soon after the Felidae had formed their amicable contract, the Vikings and the brownskins set about one another with a howl and a hurling of weapons. The dead fell everywhere. Eventually the Vikings decided to abandon the settlement and return, not to the Cold Land with No Trees but to Norway, Land of Fine Forests and Food.

  The Troll Cats sat down to consider their futures. Hedinn’s kittens were now well grown; but the queen who had borne them had died during the winter at the teeth of a bear, so Hedinn decided to rejoin the ship and return to his homeland. But Finna was heavy with the wildcat chief’s brood, and she had grown fond of the brindled natives. And so it was that one Troll Cat stayed, and one returned across the sea; and thus Hedinn Haraldsson came to be known as Hedinn the Wild, ancestor of Ragnar Gustaffson, and his fame spread so widely that he had his pick of fine Norwegian queens, a situation in which he reveled; and many fine litters did he father.

  And so it was that the offspring of Hedinn the Wild and Finna the Brave colonized the New World in an amicable manner where the upright ones had so signally failed.

  15

  The Strange Adventures of Ragnar Gustaffson

 
A cat pent up becomes a lion.

  – OLD ITALIAN SAYING

  When Ragnar saw Mousebreath, Tag, and Cy spill out of the cat catchers’ van and disappear into the night behind him, he thought, So. I am alone. Well then.

  Then he thought. It does me credit that I can think at all, with all this noise.

  Every time the van accelerated, its doors swung apart. When it slowed, they crashed together again in front of Ragnar Gustaffson’s nose. Still half tangled in the rags of the cat catcher’s net, he could barely prevent himself from sliding between them. If that happened, he would certainly be guillotined before they spat him out into the road. What a gloomy joke that would be! was his next thought. Clinging on for dear life, he managed a brief look around the inside of the van. Well, my friends are certainly gone. He missed them already. But if this is how – as one says – I ‘find’ myself, then I must do my best. He was, after all, a King. He would make his way. But first he would make a mental list.

  Much needs to be done. And the Norsk Skogkatt is rather good for work of this sort!

  *

  By the time he had accomplished the first item from the list – ‘free self from the net’ – a particularly violent lurch had slammed shut the doors of the van. This allowed him to carry out the second task with less effort than he had expected – ‘find ways to close these noisy doors!’ – and move straight to the third and perhaps most important – ‘examine surroundings.’ These he found familiar, if not reassuring: odors of hot metal and rubber, the metal floor with its bashed and dusty wooden slats, the dented ceiling and metal cages, the light falling intermittently as the machine lurched along through the night. The new cages rattled less than the old ones. They were painted a different color. They were all closed.

  They were all occupied.

  He looked up.

  Cats stared emptily down at him.

  He thought, When a kitten dies, the King dies with it. Then Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion – the look of her, her cinnamon smell, the dry hot feel of her fur against his face, her eyes at once tender, ironic, and shy, her voice, her, ‘Oh, Rags. Really!’ – rushed into his mind until there was no room for anything else.

  Pertelot! he silently called to her.

  Madness filled him. He was a full-grown Skogkatt who weighed seventeen pounds in his winter coat, and – as Sea-link might have put it – he occupied his own space like a concrete block. He reared up, spread his powerful front paws, and launched himself bodily at the first cage he saw. There was a ringing crash. His wounds opened. Blood came forth. He stared at it, so red in the bad light. The King is not an ordinary cat. ‘Our blood is a book,’ he heard his Egyptian wife whisper. Even now, they were running a wire up into her brain. ‘Our blood is a book, whether we like it or not.’ These were the wounds of a king. They were the wounds of his responsibility. If a single kitten falls, the King falls with it. A cat in a cage cries out to the King. Ragnar Gustaffson – Cœur de Lion! – raised his great sad head and howled.

  He threw himself at the cage again.

  ‘Take it easy,’ someone advised.

  But the other cats, impressed, set up a babble of encouragement and advice.

  ‘You don’t want to do it that way—’

  ‘You want to do it this way!’

  ‘Like this, with a—’

  ‘Hook! Like this! See? Hook at it!’

  ‘No, leave him! I seen it done like that! Go on, friend! Go on!’

  In the cage in front of him, huddled up in the farthest corner she could find, sat a white female cat about ten years old. Her nose was pink, her eyes blue. Her name was Cottonreel. She had not been outside much in her life; her home was in a quiet street in Cartonwell Green, and until now she had always worn a nice collar. She was as deaf as a post, rather confused about what had happened to her, and almost as frightened of the King as she was of her captors. She had been single – not for want of trying – all her life. But she had clever feet, and she could slide back a bolt. She had learned how to do that by the time she was six months old. Didn’t everyone? What a fuss about nothing!

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  Ragnar Gustaffson hurled himself at the bars of her cage. He had found the bolt, but he seemed to have no idea what to do with it.

  Perhaps ‘frightened’ was not the word for what Cotton-reel felt. Ragnar Gustaffson’s tangled mane – which could have been so impressive if someone had looked after it – was full of oil, small sticks, and flecks of white. His paws were simply the biggest she had ever seen. And he did seem very upset. But there was something fine about his leonine profile, something comforting – as she expressed it to herself, as well as rather exciting – about his smell. She sensed in him some great sorrow. So she crept toward the front of the cage and repeated, ‘Excuse me!’

  The huge cat regarded her for a moment, his green eyes glazed and rounded with the solemn lunacy of the very royal. His anger had heated the air around him, emphasizing its powerful flavors of testosterone, blood, and rusty metal. Cottonreel swallowed her anxiety and spoke up.

  ‘I think you push down first,’ she said, ‘then pull.’ She winced. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s no use shouting. I’m a bit deaf. But I think if you push it down first you’ll find—’

  Ragnar Gustaffson blinked at her.

  He raised one devastated paw and examined it. Then he reached out, lined up the bolt, and slid it gently back. The little white cat pushed open her door and walked out purring under his nose.

  *

  Nothing would satisfy Ragnar then but to go around the van and let everyone out. In the case of the cats in the top cages, this proved difficult. But – as he told them later at some length – the breed-standard of the Norsk Skogkatt requires a powerful and determined climber; and eventually they were all assembled on the floor of the vehicle, purring and rubbing against him, only congratulating him more when he modestly gave the white cat credit for her idea.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. But I must say we are not yet out of the woods. We are still in this van!’

  They stared at him hopefully.

  There were perhaps twenty of them, all different. Or perhaps not so different. Few of them were strays. Like Cottonreel, they had led decent, well-fed, fireside lives. There was a half-Aby with fur like Middle Eastern sand; two or three shiny short-haired blacks, one of whom claimed to be from bornbay; the most extraordinary bicolor blue longhair who looked like the marbling in the front of an old book and who could barely spare time to raise her head from grooming. Many of them, like Cottonreel, were pure white; and among the whites two perfectly matched Orientals stood out – tiny, emaciated, sinuous creatures with huge green eyes tinged dove gray near the pupil. Their voices were so high, and so similar, and they echoed one another so, that you never knew which one of them was speaking.

  ‘No escape—’

  ‘For us!’

  ‘They’ll make us into gloves—’ they sang ‘—into gloves—’

  ‘Into gloves.’

  It was Ragnar’s turn to stare. But Cottonreel gave the Gemi-nis a no-nonsense look.

  ‘Thanks to Mr Ragnar,’ she announced, ‘I don’t think anyone here is going to be made into gloves. But we do need a plan. And what I suggest we do is this…

  *

  Toward dawn – as Tag, now many miles away to the north, huddled beneath a tree root in fear of the vagus – a rather battered white van drew up outside a large detached house in the suburbs of a town fifty or sixty miles south of the city. There were twelve inches of soft snow in the road, and the plane trees were pasted with it. Two tired-looking human beings from the fur industry, so swathed against the weather that their arms were pushed out from their sides and their movements limited and slow, climbed down into the snow from opposite sides of the cab. Their breath steamed in the cold air. It had already been a bad night for them. Leaving the engine on, they ploughed their way around to the back doors, which they opened. In an instant, twenty cats had spill
ed out around their legs and scampered off in nineteen different directions. Gemini and Gemini had decided they would stay together, come what may. The humans stared dully. If they ran after one cat, they would lose the rest. While they were thinking about it, of course, they lost the lot.

  Ragnar Gustaffson, who had been last out – a certain amount of overcrowding and panicky behavior in the doorway had left him hard put to it – peeped around the base of an ornamental cherry while he got his breath back. He had enjoyed confusing the human beings. It was satisfying to watch his new friends scatter over garden fences, beneath cars, up and down the silent road. But what would become of them now?

  While he was pondering this, Cottonreel appeared by his side.

  ‘I came to say good-bye,’ she said shyly. ‘And to thank you. You certainly saved my skin! No, don’t say anything, I shan’t hear if you do!’ She looked away from him suddenly. ‘This is such an attractive little place,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you think? Nice houses. Oh look, there goes the bicolor! How she hates the snow!’

  ‘Mm,’ said Ragnar. ‘I can only ask: What will their lives be now?’

  She couldn’t hear him, but she saw how anxious he was. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about them,’ she advised. ‘They’ll find a place and fit in. Cats are good at that. In a month’s time, some of them will hardly remember all this.’ Her face took on rather a firm look. ‘Those absurd Geminis, for instance. And others – well, you know, domesticity doesn’t suit everyone. They’ll make a life for themselves!’

  Ragnar Gustaffson looked down at her. ‘And you?’ he said.

  She purred. ‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘I shall scratch at the first door I see and ask for warm milk.’ She shivered, then gave his bulky shoulders and tangled ruff a sideways glance full of awe. ‘I’m not like you, I’m afraid, born to be wild!’ She laughed. ‘I’ll probably end up as the post office cat!’

  ‘What is a post office?’

  ‘I can’t hear you, my dear. Good-bye!’